Emergent Research

EMERGENT RESEARCH is focused on better understanding the small business sector of the US and global economy.

Authors

The authors are Steve King and Carolyn Ockels. Steve and Carolyn are partners at Emergent Research and Senior Fellows at the Society for New Communications Research. Carolyn is leading the coworking study and Steve is a member of the project team.

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Emergent Research works with corporate, government and non-profit clients. When we reference organizations that have provided us funding in the last year we will note it.
If we mention a product or service that we received for free or other considerations, we will note it.

Assistant Edge

July 26, 2018

Google's Shadow Workforce

Bloomberg's Inside Google's Shadow Workforce covers the use by Google of what they call TVCs, or “temps, vendors and contractors". According to the article about half of Google's workforce is comprised of TVCs.

The article caused quite a stir on social media with many people expressing surprise at the numbers, especially the fact that Google is using so many TVCs.

But the growing use of non-employee labor by large corporations (and small ones too) has been an open secret for years.

We've recently covered a number of studies confirming this. These include:

A SAP/Fieldglass study showing that 44% of workforce spend at large corporation is on external, non-employee talent (see chart below).

A Randstad study showing that more than half of global human capital leaders expect to transfer one-third of their permanent positions to contingent roles in the near future.

A Deloitte study showing that corporations are increasing their use of "off-balance sheet talent", which is their term for non-employee labor

And it's not just big companies.

A November, 2017 SCORE study found that small business owners reported a 37% increase in hiring gig workers over the prior six months. They also reported more than half of surveyed small business owners plan to increase their use of non-employee talent over the next year.

There are a variety of reasons companies are increasing their use of non-employee labor. These include access to hard to find talent, improving business flexibility and agility and, in some cases, lowering costs.

We cover these reasons and the corporate use of non-employee labor in more detail in our Contingent Workforce section.